West Valley City, UT – May 29, 2014 – The largest solar parking structure in Utah was completed today in West Valley City with an official “switch flipping” event.
ACE Recycling & Disposal and AuricSolar recently installed the last batch of 919 solar panels to ACE Recycling & Disposal’s headquarters. The panels will yield 280 kilowatts of power per hour, or about $4,000 a month in electricity.
The new solar panels will help offset the facility’s current power bill of about $10,000 a month by about 40 percent, according to Matt Stalsberg, one of the company’s owners.
“We are moving forward with our goal to generate renewable energy as a step to be self-sufficient and secure our company’s future,” Stalsberg said. “All of our green decisions have to make financial sense, because you can’t do it for free.”
Owned by Stalsberg and his father, Lon Stalsberg, ACE Recycling & Disposal is one of the largest independent haulers in the Western states, servicing the residential garbage and recycling pick-up in South Salt Lake City, Murray, Midvale, Tooele, West Jordan, Eagle Mountain, Bountiful, Alpine, Centerville, Bridger Valley, Wyo., and effective July 1, South Jordan. It services about 85,000 homes and about 1,200 commercial customers in northern Utah and has been in business for 34 years.
The company is building seven new parking structures at its headquarters at 2274 S. Technology Drive which will include solar panels in addition to shaded parking for some of the company’s 190 employees. The solar parking structures will be the largest of their kind in Utah, according to Jerry Williams, Director of Commercial Sales of AuricSolar, the company installing the panels. The parking structures will be installed with the system being fully operational after just 6 weeks of construction.
Solar panels are just another step in Ace’s green initiatives. About 30 percent of its trucking fleet runs on compressed natural gas, an environmentally friendly fuel.
The company’s headquarters, built in 2010, uses one of the largest geothermal heating systems in Utah, and its landscaping is zero-scaped with water-wise plants. The company also turns recycled plastic into sidewalks that are sold in California. A complex spinning, heating and cooling process causes the plastic to compress into a strong, durable material.
“We’ve been looking at solar for the last couple of years and solar panels have gone down significantly in price,” Stalsberg said. “The high amount of sun we get in this state is pushing a lot of people in this direction, especially in the commercial sector.”
Said Williams on current solar pricing, “Solar costs are at their lowest, with an expected increase in costs this year for the first time in the history of Solar. When this project qualified for roughly 75% of its total cost in tax incentives and rebates, ACE Disposal knew that now was the time to make the shift towards power independence. In just 5 years they’ll have recovered their costs, utilizing nothing more than tax incentives and power bill dollars they otherwise would not have received a return on, giving ACE Disposal 25 warranted years of free, clean, renewable power! As a country, we installed more Solar Powered systems last year than we had the prior 20 years combined. Clearly, now is the time to take advantage of all of the incentives and lower costs.”
“This is a good test to see how well solar works,” Stalsberg said. “We have another facility and we may take a look at adding solar there as well.”
The Solar Powered structures renewable energy will offset the equivalency of taking 33 cars off the road each year, which over the expected life of this system is 1320 cars or 11,000 tons of CO2 emissions. The clean power they’ll generate would power 1800 homes or 8200 trees planted.